"Democracy" is a term now confused and sophisticated by
indiscriminate use, and often treated with patronizing contempt. Can we
agree, no matter how far we might diverge at a later point, that the
spinal principle of democracy is to place what is common to all men above
that which any organization, institution, or group may claim for itself?
This is not to deny the claims of superior natural endowment, specialized
knowledge, technical skill, or institutional organization: all these may,
by democratic permission, play a useful role in the human economy. But
democracy consists in giving final authority to the whole, rather than the
part; and only living human beings, as such, are an authentic expression
of the whole, whether acting alone or with the help
of others.

Around this central principle clusters a group of related ideas
and practices with a long foreground in history, though they are not
always present, or present in equal amounts, in all societies. Among these
items are communal self-government, free communication as between equals,
unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against
arbitrary external controls, and a sense of individual moral
responsibility for behavior that affects the whole community. All living
organisms are in some degree autonomous in that they follow a life-pattern
of their own; but in man this autonomy is an essential condition for his
further development. We surrender some of our autonomy when ill or
crippled: but to surrender it every day on every occasion would be to
turn life itself into a chronic illness. The best life possible -- and
here I am consciously treading on contested ground -- is one that calls
for an ever greater degree of self-direction, self-expression, and
self-realization. In this sense, personality, once the exclusive
attribute of kings, belongs on democratic theory to every man. Life itself
in its fullness and wholeness cannot be delegated.

In framing this provisional definition I trust that I have not,
for the sake of agreement, left out anything important. Democracy , in the
primal sense I shall use the term, is necessarily most visible in
relatively small communities and groups, whose m embers meet frequently
face to face, interact freely, and are known to each other as persons. As
soon as large numbers are involved, democratic association must be
supplemented by a more abstract, depersonalized form. Historic experience
shows that it is much easier to wipe out democracy by an institutional
arrangement that gives authority only to those at the apex of the social
hierarchy than it is to incorporate democratic practices into a
well organized system under centralized direction, which achieves the
highest degree of mechanical efficiency when those who work it have
no mind or purpose of their own.

The tension between small-scale association and large-scale
organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation,
between remote control and diffused local intervention, has now created a
critical situation. If our eyes had been open, we might long ago have
discovered this conflict deeply embedded in technology itself.

I wish it were possible to characterize technics with as much hope
of getting assent, with whatever quizzical reserves you may still have, as
in this description of democracy. But the very title of this paper is, I
confess, a controversial one; and I cannot go far in my analysis without
drawing on interpretations that have not yet been adequately published,
still less widely discussed or rigorously criticized and evaluated. My
thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near
East , right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently
existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first
system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other
man-centered 13 relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am
right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we
radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will
be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonomy
will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of
government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in
totalitarian countries.

The data on which this thesis is based are familiar; but their
significance has, I believe, been overlooked. What I would call democratic
technics is the small scale method of production, resting mainly on human
skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines,
remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the farmer, each
group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts and social
ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of nature. This
technology had limited horizons of achievement, but, just because of its
wide diffusion and its modest demands, it had great powers of adaptation
and recuperation. This democratic technics has underpinned and firmly
supported every historic culture until our own day, and redeemed the
constant tendency of authoritarian technics to misapply its powers. Even
when paying tribute to the most oppressive authoritarian regimes, there
yet remained within the workshop or the farmyard some degree of autonomy,
selectivity, creativity. No royal mace, no slave-driver's whip, no
bureaucratic directive left its imprint on the textiles of Damascus or the
pottery of fifth century Athens.

If this democratic technics goes back to the earliest use of
tools, authoritarian technics is a much more recent achievement: it begins
around the fourth millennium B.C. in a new configuration of technical
invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control that
gave rise to the peculiar mode of life we may now identify, without
eulogy, as civilization. Under the new institution of kingship, activities
that had been scattered, diversified, cut to the human measure, were
united on a monumental scale into an entirely new kind of
theological-technological mass organization. In the person of an absolute
ruler, whose word was law, cosmic powers came down to earth, mobilizing
and unifying the efforts of thousands of men, hitherto all-too-autonomous
and too decentralized to act voluntarily in unison for purposes that lay
beyond the village horizon.

The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom
or human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested
on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brought
into existence machines that were capable of exerting thousands of
horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented. This
centralized technics drew on inventions and scientific discoveries of a
high order: the written record, mathematics and astronomy, irrigation and
canalization: above all, it created complex human machines composed of
specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts -- the work
army, the military army, the bureaucracy. These work armies and military
armies raised the ceiling of human achievement : the first in mass
construction, the second in mass destruction, both on a scale hitherto
inconceivable. Despite its constant drive to destruction, this
totalitarian technics was tolerated, perhaps even welcomed, in home
territory, for it created the first economy of controlled abundance:
notably, immense food crops that not merely supported a big urban
population but released a large trained minority for purely religious,
scientific, bureaucratic, or military activity. But the efficiency of the
system was impaired by weaknesses that were never overcome until our own
day.

To begin with, the democratic economy of the agricultural village
resisted incorporation into the new authoritarian system. So even the
Roman Empire found it expedient, once resistance was broken and taxes were
collected, to consent to a large degree of local autonomy in religion and
government. Moreover. as long as agriculture absorbed the labor of some 90
per cent of the population, mass technics were confined largely to the
populous urban centers. Since authoritarian technics first took form in an
ag e when metals were scarce and human raw material, captured in war, was
easily convertible into machines, its directors never bothered to invent
inorganic mechanical substitutes. But there were even greater weaknesses:
the system had no inner coherence: a break in communication, a missing
link in the chain of command, and the great human machines fell apart.
Finally, the myths upon which the whole system was based -- particularly
the essential myth of kingship -- were irrational, with their paranoid
suspicions and animosities and their paranoid claims to unconditional
obedience and absolute power. For all its redoubtable constructive
achievements, authoritarian technics expressed a deep hostility to life.

By now you doubtless see the point of this brief historic
excursus. That authoritarian technics has come back today in an immensely
magnified and adroitly perfected form. Up to now, following the optimistic
premises of nineteenth century thinkers like Auguste Comte and Herbert
Spencer, we have regarded the spread of experimental science and
mechanical invention as the soundest guarantee of a peaceful, productive,
above all democratic, industrial society. Many have even comfortably
supposed that the revolt against arbitrary political power in the
seventeenth century was causally connected with the industrial revolution
that accompanied it. But what we have interpreted as the new freedom now
turns out to be a much more sophisticated version of the old slavery: for
the rise of political democracy during the last few centuries has been
increasingly nullified by the successful resurrection of a centralized
authoritarian technics -- a technics that had in fact for long lapsed in
many parts of the world.

Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western
nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating
under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far
more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a
military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in
that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the
transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of
this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong
democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific
ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic
purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now
given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The
inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid
builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of
unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing
omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no
less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the
notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st
to life.

Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this
authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious
weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively
disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do
not always coincide with those of the system.

Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new
technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form
tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and
defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific
knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or
automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain
organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms
of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by
national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed
for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the
mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and
Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits.

The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible
personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the
center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its
human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred
priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by
means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves
trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like
the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify
its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king,
their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the
king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their
means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new
systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible
presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be
confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the
ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer
the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective,
allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and
manipulated.

Do not misunderstand this analysis. The danger to democracy does
not spring from any specific scientific discoveries or electronic
inventions. The human compulsions that dominate the authoritarian technics
of our own day date back to a period before eve n the wheel had been
invented. The danger springs from the fact that, since Francis Bacon and
Galileo defined the new methods and objectives of technics, our great
physical transformations have been effected by a system that deliberately
eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process,
overplays the role of the abstract intelligence, and -- makes control over
physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of
existence. This system has made its way so insidiously into Western
society, that my analysis of its derivation and its intentions may well
seem more questionable -- indeed more shocking -- than the facts
themselves.

Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the
manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics? The answer to
this question is both paradoxical and ironic. Present day technics differs
from that of the overtly brutal, half-baked authoritarian systems of the
past in one highly favorable particular: it has accepted the basic
principle of democracy, that every member of society should have a share
in its goods. By progressively fulfilling this part of the democratic
promise, our system has achieved a hold over the whole community that
threatens to wipe out every other vestige of democracy.

The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a
magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract,
each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every
intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly
available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift
transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment,
education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing
that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything
offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the
precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once
one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one
surrenders one's life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as
much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied,
collectively manipulated and magnified.

"Is this not a fair bargain?" those who speak for the system will
ask. "Are not the goods authoritarian technics promises real goods? Is
this not the horn of plenty that mankind has long dreamed of, and that
every ruling class has tried to secure, at whatever cost of brutality and
injustice, for itself?" I would not belittle, still less deny, the many
admirable products this technology has brought forth, products that a
self-regulating economy would make good use of. I would only suggest that
it is time to reckon up the human disadvantages and costs, to say nothing
of the dangers, of our unqualified acceptance of the system itself. Even
the immediate price is heavy; for the system is so far from being under
effective human direction that it may poison u s wholesale to provide us
with food or exterminate us to provide national security, before we can
enjoy its promised goods. Is it really humanly profitable to give up the
possibility of living a few years at Walden Pond, so to say, for the
privilege of sp ending a lifetime in Walden Two? Once our authoritarian
technics consolidates its powers, with, the aid of its new forms of mass
control, its panoply of tranquillizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs,
could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: life itself
will not survive, except what is funneled through the mechanical
collective. The spread of a sterilized scientific intelligence over the
planet would not, as Teilhard de Chardin so innocently imagined, be the
happy consummation of divine purpose: it would rather ensure the final
arrest of any further human development.

Again: do not mistake my meaning. This is not a prediction of what
will happen, but a warning against what may happen.

What means must be taken to escape this fate? In characterizing
the authoritarian technics that has begun to dominate us, I have not
forgotten the great lesson of history: Prepare for the unexpected! Nor do
I overlook the immense reserves of vitality an d creativity that a more
humane democratic tradition still offers us. What I wish to do is to
persuade those who are concerned with maintaining democratic institutions
to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself.
There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this
authoritarian system that has given to an underdimensioned ideology and
technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat:
life cannot be delegated.

Curiously, the first words in support of this thesis came forth,
with exquisite symbolic aptness, from a willing agent -but very nearly a
classic victim! -- of the new authoritarian technics. They came from the
astronaut, John Glenn, whose life was endangered by the malfunctioning of
his automatic controls, operated from a remote center. After he barely
saved his life by personal intervention, he emerged from his space capsule
with these ringing words: "Now let man take over!"

That command is easier to utter than obey. But if we are not to be
driven to even more drastic measures than Samuel Butler suggested in
Erewhon, we had better map out a more positive course: namely, the
reconstitution of both our science and our technic s in such a fashion as
to insert the rejected parts of the human personality at every stage in
the process. This means gladly sacrificing mere quantity in order to
restore qualitative choice, shifting the seat of authority from the
mechanical collective t o the human personality and the autonomous group,
favoring variety and ecological complexity, instead of stressing undue
uniformity and standardization, above all, reducing the insensate drive to
extend the system it elf, instead of containing it within definite human
limits and thus releasing man himself for other purposes. We must ask, not
what is good for science or technology, still less what is good for
General Motors or Union Carbide or IBM or the Pentagon, but what is good
for man: not machine-conditioned, system-regulated, mass-man, but man in
person, moving freely over every area of life.

There are large areas of technology that can be redeemed by the
democratic process, once we have overcome the infantile compulsions and
automatisms that now threaten to cancel out our real gains. The very
leisure that the machine now gives in advanced countries can be
profitably used, not for further commitment to still other kinds of
machine, furnishing automatic recreation, but by doing significant forms
of work, unprofitable or technically impossible under mass production:
work dependent upon special skill, knowledge, aesthetic sense. The
do-it-yourself movement prematurely got bogged down in an attempt to sell
still more machines; but its slogan pointed in the right direction,
provided we still have a self to do it with. The glut of motor cars that
is now destroying our cities can be coped with only if we redesign our
cities to make fuller use of a more efficient human agent: the walker.
Even in childbirth, the emphasis is already happily shifting from an
officious, often lethal, authoritarian procedure, centered in hospital
routine, to a more human mode, which restores initiative to the mother and
to the body's natural rhythms.

The replenishment of democratic technics is plainly too big a
subject to be handled in a final sentence or two: but I trust I have made
it clear that the genuine advantages our scientifically based technics has
brought can be preserved only if we cut the whole system back to a point
at which it will permit human alternatives, human interventions, and human
destinations for entirely different purposes from those of the system
itself. At the present juncture, if democracy did not exist, we would have
to invent it, in order to save and recultivate the spirit of man